by Peter Peel
ALFRED ROSENBERG was born on
the twelfth day of January, 1893 and was hanged at Nuremberg at 1:49 A.M. on
the morning of 16. October 1946. He was the fourth man of the ten on whom
Master-Sergeant John C. Woods performed his grisly task as hangman on that
cold, black night. Adolf Hitler had died by his own hand on 30 April, 1945 as
the Russian army closed inexorably around the last redoubt of the Reichskanzlei
bunker. As a captive of the Russians, it is unlikely that he would ever have
been brought to any kind of trial-even such as the Nuremberg proceedings. Like
Sultan Bayazid in the hands of Timur, or Emelyan Pugachev at the mercy of that
enlightened monarch, Catherine the Great, Hitler would probably have ended in
an iron cage, suspended from the Kremlin walls and reduced, no doubt, to a
mindless vegetable by the inquisitors who had learned their trade so well in
the Lubianka cellars. And such was the prevailing mood of the times, even in
the Western democracies, that it is doubtful that any voices would have been
heard protesting.
Heinrich Himmler, too, had
poisoned himself and Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels, his wife and their six children
had perished in the same manner on the day following the death of Hitler and
Eva Braun. Martin Bormann had disappeared. He was nevertheless sentenced to
death in absentia –a procedure unknown to British or American jurisprudence– at
Nuremberg. It seems most likely now that Bormann perished in the streets of
Berlin in an attempt to escape and that his body was simply blown to bits by
some chance high-explosive shell.
Then there was the Reichs-Marschall,
Hermann Goering, jovial, ebullient, bon vivant, art lover, commander of the
Richthofen squadron in World War 1. Goering was probably the most charismatic
figure in the National Socialist hierarchy after Hitler himself. He was deputy
Führer until the last few days and always the unquestioned number-two man in
the Reich. At Nuremberg, his courage and wit frequently discomfited the duller
minds of the prosecuting team and, at the end, less than two hours before his
scheduled hanging, he was to cheat the eager hangman with a cyanide capsule he
had managed to secrete on his person.
The sentiments of those who
thus escaped the victor’s vengeance were no doubt those of Brutus at Philippi –
Thou seest the world, Volumnius, how it goes.
Our enemies have beat us to the pit.
It is more worthy to leap in ourselves
Than tarry till they push us.
Thus of the twenty-two men
indicted before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, one had
never been present and one took his own life before the sentence of death could
be carried out. Of the remaining twenty, three were acquitted of the charges
brought against them, Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen and Hans Fritzsche.
It is not my purpose in this
brief introduction to discuss the Nuremberg trials in any great detail, nor yet
the public rationale for them. At the time they were arranged for and
conducted, I was still a serving officer in the Royal Air Force of Great
Britain and had spent some six years fighting the Germans and Japanese.
Nevertheless, the whole concept of trying the leaders of a defeated enemy
nation for crimes which were only defined retroactively (ex postfacto „law“)
in a court in which the prosecution and the judicial bench belonged to the same
party, where normal rules of evidence were suspended in advance and where the tu
quoque defense („You did the same thing“) was disallowed, disturbed and
distressed me. I had been raised to believe in the impeccable majesty and
justice of British law and, indeed, with some naivetй perhaps, in its
superiority over that of all other nations.
It did not help to read a
headline in the British newspaper with the largest daily circulation-about
4,000,000-which crowed „We Shall Try Them And Hang Them.“ Nor did the fact that
by 1946 few people in the West had any doubts that the ghastly Katyn Forest and
associated massacres of some 15,000 helpless Polish officer POWs had been
perpetrated by one of the parties which were about to sit on the bench of the
International Military Tribunal. Many of us in the armed forces knew much more
than that. We knew, although we did not talk about it very much, that the most
dreadful atrocities had been committed by all the major parties in the war that
had just concluded. And in the years that have followed, our knowledge of that
aspect has increased prodigiously.
But I was only a junior
officer and very young. There were a number of prominent men, far more
important and knowledgeable than a mere flight lieutenant, who were disturbed
and distressed. And it is very doubtful if any of them could have been accused
of sympathy with the ideology of National Socialism or even with the Germans as
a nation. Apart from a long list of eminent scholars and revisionist
historians-too long to attempt to catalogue here-there were in England such men
as The Very Reverend William Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s, or the attorney, F.J.P.
Veale, whose book, Advance to Barbarism, is still one of the most effective
critiques of the Nuremberg mentality. And in the United States, Senator Robert
A. Taft knowingly sacrificed his career and a fair chance at the American
Presidency by speaking publicly against the implementation of ex post facto law
as repugnant to the whole tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and the letter
and spirit of the United States Constitution. That this was political suicide
-and Taft knew it- is a thought for the younger reader to ponder while trying
to comprehend the fanatical spirit of vengeance which dominated the era.
President John F. Kennedy well understood the nature of Taft’s deed and honored
him for it in his book, Profiles in Courage.
How different it all is today!
We have learned so many things in recent years -the truth about the sinking of
the Lusitania in World War 1, for example; or the truth about the
Churchill-Lindemann-Harris policy of terror bombing. Much, much else. Or is it
really so different? The publishing houses, many of them, and a fortiori
the movies and television, remind us almost daily of the thesis of a special
Teutonic diabolism. *
* In early 1981 it was
revealed that Churchill had made plans to rain mustard gas and deadly anthrax
bombs on German civilian centers. If the war had not ended when it did, his
plans would have been carried out and large areas of Germany, even today (1981)
would not be habitable. Hitler, however, never seriously considered the use of
gas except in retaliation to gas attacks. One reason, perhaps, is that Hitler
was himself a victim of British gas warfare in the trenches of the First World
War.-Ed.
At the time of this writing,
thirty-five years have passed since the end of World War II. Can we possibly
find some historical analog -not too distant- the events which have taken place
in the intervening years? Perhaps that would help us to gauge the truth or
falsity implicit in the title of Veale’s book.
In 1792, the French
Revolutionary government began a virtually continuous war of aggression for the
next twenty-three years against most of the rest of Europe. Its purposes were
twofold: to rally and unite factions within the nation, and to seize the
territory and exploit the resources of its neighbors. By 1796, the career of
Napoleon Bonaparte was in full flower. For nineteen more years, the Napoleonic
armies marched and countermarched across all Europe, drenching the soil of the
continent in blood. Belgium, Holland and much of Italy and western Germany were
annexed directly to France. The art treasures of the conquered peoples were
looted. Forced contributions of money and manpower were exacted from the
satellite nations. Political enemies were assassinated. General Napoleon became
dictator of Franco by a coup d’état in 1799, and emperor in 1804.
When, in 1814, Napoleon was
first defeated by the vast coalition ranged against him („How many crows were
ye against the dying eagle? „) he abdicated and was granted sovereignty over
the Italian island of Elba. He escaped and returned to France in 1815, raised
more armies and resumed the war. After his final defeat at Waterloo, he again
abdicated and was taken to the Atlantic island of St. Helena. On the way, the
ship docked at Plymouth where English crowds turned out, not to gloat or to
jeer, but to pay their respects to their fallen foe. Napoleon spent the
remaining six years of his life on St. Helena writing his memoirs and living,
with a suitable staff of aides and servants, in relative comfort (apart from
some petty irritations inflicted by the rather spiteful governor). In 1840, his
body was brought home to France and entombed magnificently in Les Invalides.
There he lies, surrounded by murals of his greatest victories, to this day the
supreme national hero of France. When Queen Victoria visited Paris, she went to
see Napoleon’s tomb and there she made her young son kneel in homage.
By 1918, the chivalrous and
aristocratic ethos had long given place to that of homo vulgaris,
democracy triumphans. And so there was heard much talk of hanging the
Kaiser. But it was only splenetic prattle. He had sought refuge in Holland and
no great pressure was exerted upon the Dutch to surrender him. In any event, he
lived out his life as a comfortable country squire on his estate at Doom. As a
final note on this part of our topic, it may be remarked that the terms imposed
on Prussia in 1807 were far more severe than those imposed on France in 1815;
and the terms imposed on Germany in 1919 were savagely punitive and „Carthaginian“
compared with those imposed on France by Germany in 1871.
But it was not until 1945 that
the victors finally progressed to the level of the Book of Esther or the story
of Samuel and Agag. Could it be that this was the ultimate triumph of
Christianity? That we were at last taking the Bible as a serious guide to
conduct? Or was it a triumph of democracy as in the Book of Esther or the story
of Samuel and Agag. Could it be that something!
The defendants at Nuremberg
were separately charged on two, three or four counts. Twelve men. including
Rosenberg, were charged on all four counts. These were:
1. Conspiracy to wage war.
2. Crimes against peace.
3. War crimes.
4. Crimes against humanity.
Richard Harwood (Nuremberg and
Other War Crimes Trials) comments as follows:
THE CHARGES could have been
drawn up by some poet or philosopher, for no specific item of legislation
passed by any specified legislature was alleged to have been broken. For
someone to be charged with a crime necessitates their breaking a law. No
country had, or has, a law against waging war. Neither does any country have a
law against waging „aggressive“ war. Who defines the aggression? When Britain
and France invaded Egypt in 1956, their leaders and generals were not arrested
and charged with waging aggressive war.
Every single one of the
charges could have been equally well laid at the Allies door. Consider:
1. Conspiracy to wage war
the Anglo-French-planned
invasion of Norway
Stalin’s planned invasion of
Poland
Roosevelt’s plans to enmesh
the USA in the war.
2. Crimes against peace
Stalin’s invasion of Poland
and Finland
Britain’s invasion of Iraq
[and Iran]
Britain’s sinking of the
French fleet at Oran
American invasion of Iceland
and Greenland.
3. War crimes
the wanton destruction of
German cities
the Soviet’ murder and
ill-treatment of German POWs
the use of Germans as slave
laborers after the war in all
the Allied European countries.
4. Crimes against humanity
the Soviet massacre of the
Poles at Katyn
the Anglo-American bombing of
civilian targets
the Soviet atrocities against
their own people before
and during the war.
Harwood has by no means
exhausted the list. Individual acts of the most appalling sadism and cruelty
were committed by Allied soldiers against both Germans and Japanese who had
already surrendered. Incidents of rape and looting were a feature of all the
Allied occupation forces in the early days, but the wholesale and unchecked
rape of the women, girls and boys in Berlin, the looting and sacking of that
city by the armies of Marshals Zhukov and Koniev, and the instant killing of
any German civilian who tried to shield his womenfolk, make the horrors of the
Thirty Years War read like an exercise in knightly and gentlemanly conduct.
But amid the cant and
solemnity of the Nuremberg „trials,“ the victors would not accept any charges
of misconduct against themselves. Alfred Rosenberg was found guilty on all four
counts and, as we have already noted, met his end on the gallows on the moming
of the 16th of October, 1946. He left behind a widow and a young daughter.
Who was this rather quiet and
withdrawn-even shy-man with the somewhat bland good looks of an upper-class
English senior civil servant? By all accounts he was, in his personal life, a
kind man, rather humorless, incorruptible. There was neither cynicism nor
pragmatism in his fanatical dedication to the National Socialist ideology but
the fanaticism only became eloquent in his writing. He lacked the extrovert
geniality to be a good conversationalist. This introversion was certainly not
characteristic of the generality of the Nazi leaders-not even of Hess whose
withdrawal appears to have developed as a result of his treatment by his
British captors after his peace-seeking flight to Scotland, in 1941. Rosenberg
seems to have been the buff of a good deal of rough humor in p circles, and not
the least on account of his name Which, In was thought of as typically Jewish,
although in the Baltic area from where he came it was commonly a gentile name
also. Yet Rosenberg remained always totally loyal and, apart from Hitler
himself, was the only member of the party to remain prominent from the earliest
days until the very end. But he was not equipped by training or temperament for
the rough and tumble of practical affairs.
Rosenberg’s tastes and
interests lay in classical music, architecture, and above all in literary and
philosophical matters. Among the great German philosophers, the works of
Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer seem to have made the deepest and most
lasting impression. But he was a voracious reader. He certainly read Ernst
Haeckel, probably the most famous of the German Indologists. He read a great
deal of the Aryan literature of ancient India, especially the Rig Veda. and it
is evident that he was well-acquainted with the Zend Avesta, the sacred
book of ancient, pre-Islamic Persia. He steeped himself in the classical
history of Greece and Rome and especially in classical mythology. This almost
omnivorous and self-directed study, together with his personal experiences in
revolutionary Russia and post-war Germany, were the two pillars upon which he
constructed his final and passionate world-view.
His vocation, however, as he
saw it and as he partially fulfilled it, was to become the custodian of the
party ideology and the author of a magnum opus which would provide National
Socialism with a definitive theory of history as a function of race. That work Der
Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts- (The Myth of the Twentieth Century).
National Socialist orthodoxy
was never as monolithic nor as all-embracing as that of Marx and Lenin. There
was, of course, agreement on the major issues-that World Jewry was the
irreconcilable enemy of all Aryan civilization and culture and especially of
Germany; that the punitive clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were intolerable
and must be rejected; that all Germans must understand and feel their spiritual
unity as a true Volk and that distinctions and rivalries of class and
faction must disappear. But apart from such general principles, there was a
wide variety of opinions an(f philosophic positions. Rosenberg was well aware
of this and at considerable pains in his Introduction to emphasize that the Mythos
was a personal philosophy. He is, for example, almost as violent. anti-Catholic
as he is anti-Jewish and only relatively less anti-Protestant. He is, in fact,
anti-Christian. Yet most of the party rank and file were Christian, and Germany
is half Catholic.
Jesus of Nazareth, he thought,
was a great man whose teachings hi been corrupted by a clever Jew, Paul of
Tarsus. In the following centuries, the Catholic church had evolved an
elaborate theology and ceremonial which had nothing in common with the Founder
and was, in fact, a resurgence of degraded Leveantine-Etruscan superstitions
decked out in spuriously „Christian“ forms.
But Rosenberg’s quarrel with
the Catholics was not simply or solely a matter of theology. There was in
Germany a powerful Catholic political party, the Zentrum Partei.
Even Bismarck, in the nineteenth century, had seen the political nature of the
Catholics in Germany as a danger to the internal peace and new-won unification
of the nation. It must be remembered that the Second Reich which came into
being in January 1871 and expired in November 1918 was never a strongly
centralized State. It contained four kingdoms-Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg and
Saxony, five grand duchies, thirteen duchies, three free cities and the
Imperial Territory ... of Elsass-Lothringer had been a dream which only . . .
three short but bitter wars had been able to realize. Bavaria, Württemberg and
the Rhineland were predominantly Catholic, and separatist tendencies always
threatened to surface in time of crisisencouraged by France and, at least in
the view of Protestant Prussia, aggravated by the recently proclaimed doctrine
of Papal infallibility which had set all Protestant Europe by the ears. The
ultramontanism which had developed as a reaction to the Napoleonic and French
Revolutionary wars was fundamentally anti-nationalist. It was so seen even in
Catholic Italy where the conflict between Italian nationalism and the Vatican
was called „the Roman Question“ and was not resolved until Mussolini’s
Concordat with the Pope in 1929. There was a strong anti-clerical party in
France. And so, in Prussia the struggle against political Catholicism was waged
by Bismarck under the banner of the Kulturkampf and the so-called „May“
or „Falk“ laws of 1873. The Jesuits were also expelled from the territory of
the Reich.
In the first few years
following World War 1, there were renewed dangers of separatism in Catholic
Bavaria and, even more seriously in the Rhineland, where the separatist
movement was encouraged by the French government and the French armies of
occupation. It is in the light of the foregoing that we must consider Rosenberg’s
attacks upon the Catholic church-not as an explicit political philosophy,
perhaps, but rather as a kind of gut-level perception of an irreconcilably
inimical force in the national body. Before deriding this as the „backward“
attitudes of Mitteleuropa sixty years ago, Americans might usefully
remind themselves that when John Kennedy was seeking the Democratic nomination,
sophisticated American politicos expressed doubts as to whether a Catholic
would be acceptable to the American people as their president and many ordinary
citizens of Protestant persuasion were genuinely alarmed that the White House
might become a branch office of the Vatican.
What of Rosenberg’s yet
greater enemy, the Jew? In some ways, the explanation is simpler and in others
more profoundly complex than his hostility to the Catholics. There was a
certain amount of literary and intellectual anti-Semitism in Germany and
Hapsburg Austria in the nineteenth century, but it was hardly more than that
which also existed in contemporary England. In England, for example, Punch, the
popular humorous magazine, frequently featured derogatory cartoons and verses
involving Jews. Lord Salisbury, and other prominent Englishmen, called Disraeli
„an unscrupulous Jew.“
People who found themselves in
financial difficulties and had to resort to money lenders were said, pityingly,
to be „in the hands of the Jews.“ And the very word „Jew“ was and is used as a
verb, as in the expression, to Jew one down.“
In Russia, anti-Jewish
sentiment was much stronger and combined two elements, peasant religiosity and
the political perception of the anarchistic, revolutionary and terrorist
movements as being heavily Jewish in their leadership. But it was probably in
France where animosity to the Jews was strongest. The early years of the Third
Republic were beset by a number of financial scandals which caused grievous
losses to the small investors and considerable suffering. When a number of
these were uncovered and Jewish financiers figured very prominently, a bitter
anti-Semitism prevailed in France which reached its apogee in the Dreyfus case.
One perhaps should also mention Poland, at that time part of the domains of the
Russian Tsar, where anti-Semitism was pandemic and where it persisted at least
until the end of the Second World War, since when its overt expression has
become a criminal offense.
Rosenberg’s anti-Semitism may
have had its earliest roots in his youth as a subject of the Tsar. But it was
doubtless his personal and direct experience of living in Moscow at the time of
the Bolshevik Revolution that made the greatest initial impression. There is no
longer any real dispute among honest historians that the leadership of the
Bolsheviks (as well as the Social Revolutionary Party-which was a much larger
group) was predominantly Jewish. No less an authority than Winston Churchill
wrote an article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald (London) in February 1920,
entitled „Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish
People,“ in which he pointed out that Jews dominated the short-lived Communist
regimes of Bela Kun in Hungary and Kurt Eisner in Bavaria no less than in Lenin’s
Russia.
Rosenberg’s extensive reading
certainly reinforced his personal observations. He had read the works of Paul
de Lagarde, a nineteenth-century professor of oriental languages at Göttingen
University who was strongly anti-Semitic. He had read the Frenchman, Count
Arthur de Gobineau, whose book, On the Inequality of Human Races, is the
seminal work of racialist thinking. Above all, he had read, at the age of
seventeen, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s monumental Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century. This last is intensely anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic.
The Aryan race has been the
creative force in all civilization. The modern Germans and their kindred
peoples are the current bearers of this creative and civilizing force (a view
shared, among others, by Theodore Roosevelt and Cecil Rhodes). Southern Europe
is a miscegenated „chaos of the peoples“ and the Jew, above all, is the eternal
enemy of Aryan values and Aryan culture.
Rosenberg, in his memoirs,
tells us that this book of Chamberlain’s ,’set him at once on fire.“
Chamberlain, it might be mentioned in passing, was the son of a British admiral
and the son-in-law of Richard Wagner. But it was in post-war Germany that the
final influence must have shaped Rosenberg’s thinking. He had visited German
relatives before the war. Until 1918, however, he had been a student at Moscow
University. He graduated in Architecture, a field he never subsequently
pursued. He must have been a talented student, however, for he was asked by his
professor to remain at the University as a member of the faculty.
Instead he made his way to a
defeated, humiliated and starving Germany, apparently by way of Paris. The
leadership of the radical Left parties, the Communists, the Social Democrats,
the Independent Socialists and the Spartacists, was mostly Jewish. It had been
these elements which had promoted disastrous strikes in the last year of the
war and had been largely instrumental in tormenting the insurrections and the
naval mutiny which led to the abdication of the Kaiser and the establishment of
the so-called Weimar Republic.
Whether Germany could have
long continued to resist the enormous power of the Allies, especially after the
total collapse of her own three allies, is a moot point. But it was commonly
felt throughout Germany that the total defeat and utter helplessness of Germany
before the triumphant victors was precipitated and made inevitable by treason
on the home front in which Jewish influence was the greatest factor and that,
but for this, Germany might have held out long enough to secure a truly
negotiated peace rather than submit to a merciless Diktat.
Nor was this all. Until hated
Tsarist Russia had been overthrown and defeated, worried Jewry and, especially,
German Jewry had supported the cause of the central powers. After that, Jewish
support switched to the allies. The negotiations in 1916 which led up to the
Balfour Declaration of the following year were later admitted by the British
wartime Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, to have been undertaken because of
the need felt to win the support of the Zionist movement throughout the world.
There exists strongly suggestive evidence that the success of this ploy created
a quidpro quo situation between the British government and the
powerful American Zionists who, in turn, brought irresistible pressure on
President Wilson to bring about the decisive participation of the United States
in the war.
In any event, the Weimar
Republic which lasted from the end of 1918 to the beginning of 1933, was
politically a middle-of-the-road democracy. Socially it was a period of extreme
libertarianism and, indeed, license. Berlin came to be seen by traditionalist
and conservative observers as the …cesspool of Europe.“ To others, it was the
haven of total permissiveness where anything went and every passion and vice
could be indulged with impunity. Istvan Deak, who admired Berlin society of the
period, wrote of it:
Berlin harbored those who
elsewhere might have been subjected to ridicule or persecution. Comintern
agents. Dadaist poets, expressionist painters, anarchist philosophers, Sexualwissenschaftler,
vegetarian and Esperantist prophets of a new humanity. Schnorrer („freeloaders,“
artists of coffeehouse indolence) courtesans, homosexuals, drug addicts, naked
dancers, and professional criminals flourished in a city which was hungry for
the new, the sensational, the extreme. Moreover, Berlin became the cultural
center of Central and Eastern Europe as well.
Peter Gay, another well-known
Jewish historian, in a book with a significant sub-title (Weimar Culture: The
Outsider as Insider), writes in a similar vein, telling us that when we think
of Weimar, we think of modernity in art, literature and thought; we think of
the rebellion of sons against fathers, Dadaists against art, libertines against
old-fashioned moralists; we think of the The Threepenny Opera, The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari, The Magic Mountain, the Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich . . .
Die Weltbühne was the
most prominent and influential of the left-wing literary journals. Not to have
read the latest issue, according to Kurt Hiller, was considered uncouth. Of the
sixty-eight writers whose religious origins could be established, forty-two
were found to be of Jewish descent, two were half-Jews and only twenty-four
were non-Jews (of whom three were married to Jewesses) Deak tells us: „The
enthusiasm of the Weltbühne writers for revolutionary socialist
propositions was to a great part due to the recognition of their inescapable
Jewish condition. „
Deak tells us further, but
with an air of approbation, that of those who now dictated public taste and
morals and „corrupted their customers“, more than three-fourths were not
natives, but came from Austria, Hungry, the Ukraine and Poland. These were the
people whom Walter Rathenau, himself a Jew, called „an Asiatic horde on the
Brandenburg sands. „
The late Sir. Arthur Bryant, a
respected historian and a conservative Christian gentleman, wholly out of
sympathy with the Nazi regime which followed the Weimar period, is by reason of
those very qualities and traits a most reliable source is dealing with the
nature of the Weimar Republic. In his book, Unfinished Victory, which was
published just before the outbreak of World War 11, he describes in vivid and
evocative language the alien quality of the „200,000 or more Jews“ who thronged
Berlin. Many of them (he says) had poured into the country during the post-war
upheaval. They did not stay poor long. Bryant points out that as late as
November 1938, after five years of anti-Jewish legislation, Jews still owned
about one-third of all real property in the Reich, most of it acquired during
the disastrous inflation of 1923 with foreign funds obtained through their
international connections.
In 1924, Viscount D’Abernon,
the British ambassador, held a conversation with Gustav Stresemann in which the
latter spoke of the growing hatred of the Jews. „The mass of the people,“ said
Stresemann, „are discontented because they find that they themselves are poor
while the Jews are rich, and they ask, ‘why has the government allowed this?’ „
Bryant says that although the
Jews comprised only one percent of the population, their control of the
national wealth and power soon lost all relation to their numbers. In the 1924 Reichstag,
a quarter of the Social Democrats were Jews. Jews controlled 57% of the metal
trade, 22% of the grain, and 39% of the textile. More then 50% of the members
of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce were Jews, as were 1,200 of the 1,474 members
of the Stock Exchange. Of the 29 legitimate theaters in Berlin, 23 had Jewish
directors. At one point, says Bryant (quoting an anti-Nazi book by E. Mowrer,
Germany Puts the Clock Back), so complete was the Jewish monopoly of the
Press that „a telephone connection between [sic] three Jews in Ministerial
Offices could effect the suspension of any newspaper in the State.“
Authorship, continues Bryant,
was almost a Jewish monopoly. In 1931, of 144 film scripts worked, 119 were
written by Jews and 77 produced by them. Medicine and law followed the same
pattern; 42% of the Berlin doctors were Jews (1,932) and 48% of the lawyers. „Every
year it became harder for a Gentile to gain or keep a foothold in any
privileged occupation. „
In Walter Mehring’s play The
Merchant of Berlin, the hero, a poverty-stricken Jewish immigrant,
...soon has the whole town at
his feet with his wonderful adroitness and freedom from bourgeois moral
scruples ... he derides every cherished symbol of German morality and national
pride and holds them up to ridicule. The soldier’s corpse and steel helmet ...
swept away with the scourings of the street, are shown to weigh nothing ...
against the predatory courage, the quick cunning and the rollicking sensual
opportunism of the little hero. To the disinherited German they stood for
something very different for love of country, duty now shamed and made the
sport of the gutter. Human beings with their long and diverse histories cannot
always be expected to see things in the same way.
Bryant points out that beggars
on horseback are seldom popular and that this particular species was arrogant,
vulgar and vicious. In a particularly moving passage, he speaks of his vivid
and painful recollection of seeing the throngs of half-starving children of
both sexes who haunted the doors of the great hotels and restaurants to sell
their bodies to rich arrivistes.
There follow several pages in
Bryant’s book of detailed description of the contents of display windows of
bookshops specializing in pornography and the literature of perversion, and of
the general moral degradation in daily life and in art. Bryant is distressed,
too, by the undisguised scorn for Christianity-a Jewish poet’s (Carl Zuckmayer)
comparing a cat caterwauling on the roof at night with Jesus at Bethsemane, or
a Jewish writer’s depicting Christ as a drunken lecher.
Major Francis Yeats-Brown
(European Jungle) adds a few figures to Bryant’s, relative to the
disproportionate power of Jews in the professions. He tells us that in Berlin
1,925 out of 3,450 lawyers were Jews and in Frankfort, 432 out of 659. Fifteen
Jewish bankers held 718 directorships. In Vienna, 85% of the lawyers, 70% of
the dentists, more than 50% of the physicians, were Jews. The boot and shoe
industry was 80% Jewish, as were the newspapers; the banks, 75%; the wine
trade, 73%; the cinema, 70%; lumber and paper, 70%; fur and furriers, 87%;
bakeries and laundries, 60%.
Even Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who
was visiting Germany at the height of the immediate post-war economic distress
in order to raise money for the Jewish immigrants in Palestine, spoke
disparagingly of the Jews in Germany. He told the British Ambassador that Jewish
intellectuals in Germany were most overbearing and aggressive, and quite
intolerable. Most significantly, he referred to them as „a race apart,
differing widely from the native races.“ But the „race apart“ dominated the
culture and many, if not most, of the professions, as we have indicated above.
Peter Gay, writing of the vast Ullstein publishing empire, says that their
power was almost frightening and that for a writer without a private income the
favor of Ullstein meant luxury, its disfavor near-starvation.
In the flourishing theater,
even the great classics were cut, edited and distorted to fit the exigencies of
left-wing propaganda. Leopold Jessner, whom Gay calls „the most powerful man in
the Weimar theater,“ staged a deliberate distortion of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell
in which all the patriotic references to Fatherland were cut and the play
converted into a call for revolution. The tyrant Gessler was portrayed as a
bemedalled caricature of a Junker general. Albert Bassermann played Tell and
Fritz Kortner played Gassier. Both were Jews. The production was in 1919. Well
might Gay say:
Hugo Preuss, the architect of
the Weimar Constitution, was a symbol of the revolution; as a Jew and a
left-wing democrat ... he, the outsider, gave shape to the new Republic, his
Republic.
In his study of the Weltbühne,
Deak tells us that it was the duty of that journal to plead the case of the
convicted criminal, the abortionist mother, the homosexual, and the prostitute.
In 1925, Erich Leisar, in its pages, was demanding legalized abortion. The
magazine ardently espoused the cause of George Groß in his trial (he was
acquitted) for publishing a blasphemous cartoon. Kurt Hiller demanded the
abolition of laws against homosexuality, and Magnus Hirschfeld objected even to
the prohibition against adult immorality with children.
Kurt Tucholsky, a Weltbühne
editor, wrote that the journal served a good cause, that of transforming
Teutschland into Deutschland. (Teuschland is an archaic form used symbolically
to represent all that was traditional and historic in Germany.) A brief glance
at some of Tucholsky’s utterances and attitudes as reported in Deak’s work
might well epitomize this limited sampling of our subject. That „ . . . Judaism
and unquestioning German patriotism were mutually exclusive propositions - - - „
may well be true, and Tucholsky seems to have sought out every sensitive and
exposed nerve he could find in order to play upon it. His favorite target was
the Army. German officers during the war, he declared, had cared more for their
whores than their men. In a brilliant but savage pun on Ein Volk der Dichter
und Denker; (a people of poets and thinkers), he called the German people
„Ein Volk der Richter und Henker“ („a people of judges and hangmen“):
... we betray a state that we
disavow . . . The country I am allegedly betraying is not my country; this
state is not my state; this legal system is not my legal system. Its different
banners are to me as meaningless as are its provincial ideals.
Tucholsky finally gave up the
editorship of Weltbühne and went to live in Paris. His successor was convicted
of betraying military secrets and sentenced to imprisonment in 1931.
In music (or perhaps
anti-music) the name of Arnold Schönberg is prominent. The prophet of atonality
developed his twelve-tone system and Sprechgesang in 1924. In the
following year carne the first performance of Alben Berg’s opera Wozzech, which
used Schönberg’s system. The „hero“ is an ignorant soldier who commits murder
and suicide. In 1928 Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper opened
at the Schiffbauerdamm, with music by Kurt Weill. The milieu of the play
is the lumpenproletariat world of prostitutes, thieves and beggars,
Barbara Sapinsley describes it as „a burlesque of modern society showing it
ruled by a criminal underworld.“ Mackie Messer, says Gay taunts his bourgeois
audience for loving its own fat belly and assures it „Erst kommt das
Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.“
Deak denies that Brecht was a
Jew but admits that in at least two publications he is so listed. Deak’s own
attitudes may be evaluated by his statement that „ . . . such Communists as
Bertholt Brecht . . . [and others] . . . were responsible for much of the
cultural brilliance and vitality of the Weimar period.“
Another diabolic vision is to
be found in the works of Franz Kafka. Günther Anders, discussing Kafka’s art,
compares the latter’s concept of beauty to the Gorgon’s head. Kafka argues that
the existence of evil proves the existence of an evil God: divine authority,
the law, and evil, are one. The essential Jewish quality of Kafka’s thought,
says Anders, lies in his total rejection of the concept of „Nature,“ of a world
apart from man and man’s institutions as an untouched preserve of loveliness
and reverence.
A word must be said on an
institution whose lifespan coincided exactly with that of the Republic
itself-the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was opened by Walter Gropius in the city of
Weimar in 1919 as a school of „artistic unity.“ The names associated with it
were not all those of Jews. Gropius himself was not a Jew (Franz Werfel
converted from Judaism to Catholicism). But most of the important figures in
the circles were Jews -Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard
Marcks, Oskar Schlemmer, Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, inter alia.
Its ultimate mood was „frantic pessimism.“ In 1925 the citizens of Weimar
expelled the Bauhaus artists from their town, says Deak, from where they moved,
via Dessau, to Berlin.
Such then was the Germany to
which the young Rosenberg came from Bolshevik Russia and which he surveyed with
loathing, anger and disgust. And thus he began his fateful career in the
nascent National Socialist German Workers Party. He joined the party in 1919
having attended a meeting at which he immediately and permanently fell under
Hitler’s spell. In 1921, he became the editor of the party newspaper, the Völkischer
Beobachter. He contributed a great many articles and wrote and published
some relatively minor books. After Hitler and Hess were imprisoned at Landsberg
in 1924, Rosenberg became a kind of custodian of the, then, interdicted Nazi
party. In due course, he became head of the foreign policy office of the party
(not to be confused with the government foreign office) and was also in charge
of defining party policy with regard to secondary and higher education. In
1940, he headed a special staff which had the responsibility of collecting and
safeguarding the art treasures of the occupied Eastern territories. This gave
rise to the charge against him at Nuremberg of the wholesale looting of art
treasures. It might be salutary to recall in passing that some 6,000 German
paintings were „liberated“ by the American occupation authorities after World
War II and shipped to the United States to be stored at Pueblo, Colorado.
President Carter recently refused a request by the Bonn regime to return the
paintings to their German owners.
In 1941, Rosenberg was given
the responsibility of setting up the civil administration of the occupied
Russian and Baltic territories. The appointment seems to have been-or soon to
have become-a merely ceremonial position. His nominal subordinates, men like
Erich Koch and Heinrich Löhse, exercised the real administrative power. As for
the SS., it was under the control of Heinrich Himmler and quite independent
from Rosenberg’s office.
At Nuremberg, Rosenberg was
also charged with having encouraged the invasion of Norway. This really was a
monstrous piece of Allied hypocrisy. Norwegian coastal waters had already been
deliberately violated by the British navy, as in the case of the Altmark
incident. At the time of the German invasion, an Anglo-French expeditionary
force was already in the process of being formed and the Germans simply beat it
to the punch. Such was the immediate confusion that Neville Chamberlain even
uttered the hollow boast that „Hitler has missed the bus“ when the Allies
landed at Narvik.
When Rosenberg’s life and
career are examined with impartiality and detachment -as one would hope were
possible after so long a period of time has elapsed- one is forced to the
conclusion-that his real „crime“ was racism and, more specifically, anti-Semitism.
He was hanged, it would appear, for what he thought and wrote. The American
prosecutor hammered away on this point. Rosenberg’s writings, he charged, were
instrumental in the rise of the Nazi party to power. It seems a strange sort of
indictment coming from the representative of a power which is always so smugly
self-congratulatory about the First Amendment.
Rosenberg was twice married.
His first wife, Hilda Leesmann, was a ballet student and an accomplished
classical pianist. He met her in Riga and they were married in 1915. She
contracted tuberculosis, apparently as a result of the dreadful privations
attendant upon the war in Eastern Europe and during the Bolshevik Revolution.
She went to Switzerland in 1918. Alfred and she did not see each other again
and in 1923 he allowed her to divorce him. In 1925, he married Hedwig Kramer.
They had one son who died in infancy and a daughter, Irene, born in 1930. Hedwig
and Irene withdrew as far as possible from public life and notice after 1946.
Why should anyone read the
Mythos today? It is open to much criticism as a book. It is not a scientific
treatise on race. It is not a lofty, detached (I will not say „impartial“
because historical impartiality is a noble illusion, impossible to attain) work
of history, Rosenberg is no stylist. His mind races ahead of his syntax and one
subordinate clause after another attach themselves to his original sentences.
The result, all too often, reminds the reader of Mark Twain’s dictum: „whenever
the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to
see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with the verb in
his mouth.“ His citations do not conform to the accepted canons of scholarship.
While patently honest and authentic, they are often incomplete as to publishing
data.
But when all these negative
aspects have been given due notice, there remains a battery of the most
powerful arguments for reading him. For students of history, the Mythos is an
important historical document. For students of politics and political
psychology, it is equally so. There is vast and most impressive erudition. It
might not be too high-flown to say that there is the soul of a man and, perhaps
of a nation-or at least of an epoch-on display. Our knowledge and understanding
of the ideology and the Zeitgeist of the Third Reich and, indeed, of its
immediate antecedents, is seriously incomplete without the Mythos.
It is not the function of the
writer of an Introduction to another man’s work to adumbrate the contents and
arguments of that work. Still less is it his function to analyze and argue the
pros and cons of the argumentation or the validity of the author’s views.
Briefly, therefore, and in conclusion, Rosenberg’s view is that the various
races of man possess racial souls. These racial souls are as enduring and
immutable as the racial phenotype-no more and no less. They give rise to
cultures, values, religions and political systems which are uniquely congruent
with the race in question and are alien to any other race. Miscegenation brings
about the degeneration and destruction of such cultures by reason of a kind of
schizophrenic condition of racial bastardy. Aryan man has created all the great
civilizations of ancient India, ancient Persia, Greece, Rome and, probably,
Egypt. Each has ultimately decayed and falled by reason of race-mixing.
It is certainly not a new
idea. Juvenal in the second century, contemplating the polyglot, polyracial
population of a Rome which by then was mainly made up of Levantines, Egyptians
and other Near Eastern immigrants, uttered his famous warning: „In Tibetim
defluxit Orontes.“ The last great Aryan civilization is that created by the
Teutonic branches of the Aryan race since the fall of Rome. That civilization
is now threatened by a rebellion and resurgence of the non-Aryan
elements-especially the Jews and Levantine Christianity. The natural values of
Aryan man include the concept of honor which takes precedence over the
Christian ethics of diffuse and undirected love and pity. The Aryan pantheon is
one of sky-gods, not earth or subterranean (cthonian) deities. Aryan society is
partriarchal rather than matriachal. Aryan man is the first and only
racial-type which has been able to construct rational scientific and
investigatory systems of thought, free from superstitious or religious
corruptions. Why did Rosenberg think that way? What evidence or argumentation
does he offer to support his case? For that, patient reader, you must read his
book.
Peter
Peel Reseda, California 1981
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